Standing in the centre of the Clementinum – if you can locate such a
thing in the labyrinth – you are surrounded by around a millennium of
history and millions of volumes of books inside one of the most beautifully
preserved masterpieces of Baroque art the city of Prague has to offer. This
is the seat of the Czech National Library and the whispering and rustling
that echoes through its grand halls add perfectly to its natural
mysteriousness.

Photo: CzechTourism
Right now we are finding that things were being built here even in the 6th
century. Archaeology has shown that this part of the Vltava, at the eastern
foot of Charles Bridge, has always been a favourite of the Czechs’
ancestors, with evidence of settlement going back to the 400s AD. But the
story of the Clementinum begins in the early 13th century, as the
library’s Libuše Piherová told me as we walked around the vaulted
galleries.

“There is a legend that there was a female hermit living here who had a
dream in which Saint Clement told her she should visit the Dominicans in
Poříčí and lead them here. The legend says that she convinced them, and
the annals show that the Dominicans did indeed come in 1232 and built a
monastery that was as large as the Students’ Courtyard here, which is
where it was located. Its size of course cannot be compared with the
Clementinum today. Few people know it, but with its two hectares, the
Clementinum is the second largest historical building in the city after
Prague Castle.”

Photo: archive of Radio Prague
The Dominican Order was spreading across Europe and beyond in the 13th
century. And despite their emphasis on mysticism and asceticism, Dominican
learning and scholarship founded the strong tradition of the future
Clementinum in the days of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus.

“One of the Dominicans’ ambitions was to be great teachers, which they
were, and major European educators of the time worked here and created
manuscripts of great renown that we still have in our collections. But they
were also interested in social matters and they organised the first local
parliaments of noblemen here between the reigns of Otakar II and Charles
IV. So you could really say that this place, the Clementinum, has always
been a place of books and learning – a place of the mind, to put it
generally.”

The Dominicans were also some of the church’s best inquisitors, and it
was they who imprisoned the Czech Reformer Jan Hus in the early 15th
century. No sooner did the Catholic legions march on Prague than the
Hussites destroyed them, banished the “black monks” and ravaged their
works.

Photo: archive of Radio Prague“The Hussites came in 1420 and laid ruin to the monastery and expelled
the Dominicans, who escaped to Poland. The ruins remained here until 1556,
when Emperor Ferdinand dedicated the land to the Jesuits. They in turn
bought up all of the adjoining houses and gardens, and began creating an
admirable architectural, and later ecclesiastical work. Straight away they
established a Latin secondary school, which within sixty years became a
college.”

The developing dormitories at what would become the Clementinum would soon
after be used as a book storage space for the growing Charles University,
and the rest, you could say, is history. The present building was
constructed by the Jesuits between 1653 and 1726 and has changed very
little since then, imparting upon Prague what many call its “Baroque
Pearl”.

“The Jesuits were very good builders among other things, and the
Clementinum was built like a kind of fortress that they called Insula
nostra Klementinum, ‘our island Clementinum’, by which they meant that
they were completely self-sufficient here from the gardens in which they
grew vegetables to the very efficient sewage system, printing room,
dispensary, study rooms and everything needed for life.”

Photo: archive of Radio Prague
The enormous complex, perhaps needless to say, also includes a great many
ecclesiastical buildings –St. Salvador Church and the Church of Saint
Clement, the Chapel of Mirrors, Chapels of Saint Eligius and Saint Jan of
Nepomuc and a chapel dedicated to the assumption. And then there is hall
after grand hall, dedicated to mathematics, music and of course literature.

“What visitors are always most impressed with and what I always like to
point out is the ‘newest’ piece of furniture in the Baroque Library
Hall, which bears the inscription ‘Bibliotheca Nationalis’. When the
monasteries were closed in the 1780s by Joseph II, who saw better sue for
them as warehouses and hospitals, their manuscripts were stored in the
Chapel of Mirrors here. The second director of the Clementinum set aside
the few Czech and Slovak documents that he found and put them in a
compartment in the Baroque Library Hall with the sign reading
‘Bibliotheca Nationalis’. And that was really the beginning of the
National Library.”

The astronomical tower, photo: archive of Radio Prague
The Clementinum is large alright, but not nearly large enough for the 6.5
million books that the National Library has in its possession. The recent
completion of the National Technical Library took a great strain off, but
even the central depository built on the other side of Prague in 1997 is
past capacity now. Consensus was never reached on a plan to construct a new
library in Prague and so the Clementinum currently finds itself under an
extensive ten-year process ‘revitalisation’ intended to increase
storage space. But there is more to the Clementinum than just books. One of
its most popular features, for example, is its looming astronomical tower.

“The astronomical tower was completed in 1722, and at first it was only
used as a sort of lookout tower. The Jesuits were always interested in
using things for study, so from the 1750s they began using it for
astronomical and also climatological measurements, among other things. In
the year 1775 Antonín Strnad began a series of continuous measurements of
the temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure. These measurements were
taken several times a day, every day, and they are still being taken
today.”

In the short story “The Secret Miracle” by Jorge Luis Borges, an aged
librarian spends his life seeking a single letter on a single page of a
book, somewhere in the Clementinum, that contains God. There could hardly
be a more suitable venue for such an endeavour, given the weight of history
and the general, all-pervasive mysteriousness of the Clementinum that Dr
Piherová says can be put down to a number of factors.

Father Koniáš“We don’t know everything that happened here, but we know that during
the time of the Dominicans a tribunal of the inquisition was headquartered
here. We have documentation that in 1414 on one of our courtyards there
were burnings of so-called heretics. So that is a stain on the history of
the Clementinum... and there is one other stain (the rest is all good):
there was the work of Father Koniáš, who was a son of supervisor here and
a zealous Jesuit with a flair for oratory and he would faint during his
sermons. He is very well known for having burnt Czech books and survives in
nursery rhymes. So the many thousands of books that he destroyed may have
been another reason for the gloomy associations of the Clementinum
today.”

To say nothing of the ghost of Saint Edmund Campion, who studied here in
the 16th century before coming up with the unfortunate idea of
re-Catholicising his native England and being tortured and executed almost
upon arrival, before returning to the Clementinum 500 years later as a
spectre of death to terrify the secretaries in the economic department. All
these stories and more enjoy tremendous interest among visitors, both
foreign and domestic, and will be yours to enjoy again when the building
reopens later this year.